The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

from the start the United States found itself with a constitution founded on a permanent clash between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and between federal power and states’ rights (epitomized by the fierce ideological battles between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in the early decades of the Republic) and a sectional split between a commercial-minded North and a slave-owning South. It was also a society delicately balanced between individualism and volunteerism and between a business- and engineer-centered culture of focused practicality and a religious evangelism bordering on mysticism. Clearly, some kind of conceptual glue was going to be needed to hold all these disparate elements together if the new republic was going to survive. For nearly seventy years, Americans found it in the ideas of Common Sense Realism.